Catharina
Barely 37 women in Poland carry it, and not one girl has been given it this century: most Poles will never meet a Catharina. It's the foreign spelling of Katarzyna, from the Greek for "pure".
Catharina Pronunciation
What Catharina means
Where Catharina comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Catharina reaches back to the Greek name Aikaterine. Scholars still argue over its oldest meaning, and no one has settled the matter. The sense of "pure" came later, once speakers heard the Greek word katharos, meaning clean, sitting inside the name. That reading stuck.
In Poland the name firmed up as Katarzyna, and from Katarzyna came Kasia. Kasia is the form a girl answers to when the teacher reads the class register. The fuller Catharina keeps the Latin spelling that clerks once used in parish books.
Saint Catherine of Alexandria carried an early shape of the name in the fourth century, and her legend pulled it across Europe. Her feast fixed a name-day in Poland on 25 November, still marked as Katarzyna's imieniny. So a bearer holds a Greek root, a Polish variant, and one short meaning: czysta, pure.
How many people are named Catharina
1 in 609293 women in Poland is named Catharina. 37 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #6438 among female names.
Catharina as a middle name
Catharina is a first name for 37 women in Poland and a middle name for another 37, a 50/50 split, almost evenly. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 1137th, between Bożysława (37) and Estella (37).
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#1135 Anżelika37
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#1136 Bożysława37
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#1137 Catharina37
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#1138 Estella37
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#1139 Gemma37